Will Quantum Computing Spell the End of Bitcoin?

As previously mentioned in the Financial
Times, Google claims to have built the world's 1st Quantum
computer. This grants Google the greatest computational power ever seen, and
makes super-computers look old-fashioned & obsolete.

Google's researchers have posted a paper on a NASA website
before getting removed or deleted. In the paper that was published, the capabilities
of Google's quantum computer's power were revealed. The quantum processor has
been rumored to perform a calculation in three minutes and 20 seconds, that
would take today's most powerful super-computer "Summit" roughly
10,000 years.

"This dramatic speed-up relative to all known classical
algorithms provides an experimental realisation of quantum supremacy on a
computational task and heralds the advent of a much-anticipated computing
paradigm," claimed Google's researchers

As with Moore's law which claims that "the number of
transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles about every two years",
one can expect quantum computers to advance at an accelerating pace.

Bitcoin & Google's Quantum Computer

According to Google's post, the quantum computer used had a
53-qubit processing power. This essentially means that it could hypothetically
crack 53-bit encryption in a matter of seconds.

Hypothetically this could mean that Bitcoin's 256-bit
encryption might be obsolete in a few years.

For the time being, Google's computer can only perform a
single highly technical calculation at a time. In addition to that, quantum
computers are still years away from being able to solve practical problems.

It does seem that in the years to come, Bitcoin and other
cryptocurrencies will need a security upgrade or fork. If not, quantum computers
could hypothetically be used to crack private keys to wallets. Old legacy
wallets, such as Satoshi's cache of Bitcoin could be at risk.

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